Pro D Day Reflection

 After attending the math pro-d virtual conference. I have come to realize the innovation that teachers have strived for in the teaching of math. While I have attended plenty of Pro-D sessions working in a school for the past 5 years. I have never attended the math conference as I was more focused on conferences that involved work with students with learning differences as working with these students was my main role in my school. The conference was vey engaging and lead to some useful information that I actually used in my short practicum experience. The most impactful was the use of desmos in the math classroom. Previously I worked in a more affluent neighborhood and the students were afforded with the luxury to speed $100+ on a Texas instruments graphing calculator and since this was required for their courses, this was the norm for them. It was "no big deal" when they lost or damaged their calculators, they simply asked their parents to buy them a new one. So as I was aware of the Desmos as a program you could use online, much of my work was focused on students using the graphing calculators. When I went to my practicum school however, it was in a far less wealthy school where parents did not have extra income to spend on an expensive graphing calculator. My SA therefore did not require the use of a graphing calculator in his classes. Instead, he would demonstrate and explore graphing using desmos. The students all had phones which they could access desmos from and explore graphing in a completely new and much more powerful way. Using desmos, students could do much much more than just using a regular graphing calculator and the accessibility and ease of use I feel really enhanced their learning. The user interface was quite intuitive and important information such as intercepts, intersection points and such were automatically shown to them. The workshop on desmos showed me how to engage with the students using the program and how to let the students explore on their own in order to come to conclusions about graphing and solving equations that is much more effective than just telling the students about the properties of those functions.

Another take away from the conference was the idea of engaging with students in a low risk environment. In order to take a much more involved and personal approach, creating an environment where risk taking is encouraged and both curricular and non curricular problem solving and exploration can really help to increase engagement to for students. I witnessed this first hand in my practicum experience. The first was when I conducted a group problem solving activity using Susan's locker problem in class as an activity that taught students to recognize patterns. The students were so engaged that many of them wanted to stay after class in order to solve the problem when in most cases these same students would be rushing to pack up and leave 5 minutes before the bell. The second was when my SA changed that way he assessed the students. He told them to bring in a game of their choice and consider that probabilities involved in those games. The students then worked in small groups to play those games. At the end of the "lesson" My SA asked each student to describe their game and based on what they learned about probability explain to the class how their game related to probability. He took notes on how each student responded and gauged their understanding based on their answers. I found this a very interesting way to make the class fun (with students engaged in games) but at the same time turned it into a way to formatively assess his students' understanding.